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WordPress.com Blog Bling

WordPress.com blogs are limited to what can be done within the post content area, the only really “customizable” area users have access to. I popular series, called WordPress.com Blog Bling, was a challenge to myself and others to push WordPress.com’s post content area to its creative limits. It covered fonts, lists, blockquotes, images, video, lines, smilies, podcasts, writing code in your posts, adding a signature, and how to ad other graphic and visual design elements.

WordPress Tips

I love the full version of WordPress and have several WordPress blogs that I’ve dug into, fully customized and tweaked – and broke – too many times to mention. Here are some tips for full version WordPress blogs I’ve written over the past two years on this blog.

Finding WordPress Themes

Choosing a WordPress Theme

Choosing a WordPress Theme isn’t just about the “pretty”. A WordPress Theme is a dynamic creature, with the potential for every page on a WordPress blog to look and feel different. The most simple WordPress Themes have a “look” for the front page, single post page view, and the category and other multi-post page views at a minimum. More complex Themes change depending upon the request the visitor makes on the blog. It opens up a wide range of possibilities, and makes finding the right WordPress Theme for your blog a little more difficult.

Designing WordPress Themes for Public Release

A WordPress Theme you design for yourself meets your needs and is as good a Theme as you are a designer. A WordPress Theme released for others to use has to be more. It has to be checked, tested, and rechecked so it will work within all circumstances and situations. It has to be safe from security vulnerabilities and flaws. It must be supported, and it must be updated as web technology and WordPress changes.

Here are some tips specifically for those who want to release their WordPress Themes to the public:

WordPress Plugins

I love WordPress Plugins, and their creative authors. What they bring to the WordPress table is the ability for our blogs to go beyond just the basics – they allow us to customize and tweak them infinitely.

I’ve written a lot about various WordPress Plugins, but here are some tips for installing and using WordPress Plugins.

A Month of WordPress Tips

This seems like a lot of WordPress tips, leaving nothing left for the next month, but trust me, I have a long list of WordPress tips to bring to you, and I know my guest bloggers have even more.

That’s the joy of WordPress. It is infinitely flexible, customizable, and tweakable. What you do with it is up to your imagination and ability. Hopefully, with all these great WordPress tips, your abilities will improve and your imagination will be stimulated with the possibilities.

Actually, when I look at the list, I see that I haven’t covered WordPress Tips as extensively as I thought I had. There are SO many tips I wanted to cover, and now this whole month gives me and others the chance to tackle my favorite subject.😀

Thanks for the colossal collection! Great idea and example of a round up publishing format to work towards. This list widens the scope of what WordPress can do – amazing. Looking forward to the series.

I am very glad you, your tips and your guest authors have been around for the past two years. Although I haven’t left a comment recently, I’ve always found you and yours one of the very first sources of WordPress info that I turn to when I hit a snag, when someone else hits a snag or needs info and just for great reading.

Many thanks for all your work. perhaps someday I can make it to an SOB convention and thank you personally.

I am fairly new to wordpress, and am struggling with some of the plugins. Can you provide some explanations on how to make adsense deluxe work, and amazon? also ultimate tag warrior. generally their pages either assume the user is already expert, or are written in jargon….

These Plugins come with fairly good documentation, but you can learn more on installing them from How to Install, Configure, and Use WordPress Plugins. The Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin does not work for current versions of WordPress and has stopped being updated as the next version of WordPress will include tags built-in.

Is what updated? The articles referenced? This was published and many of the articles written during the month celebrating the two year anniversary of WordPress and this blog in August of 2007. WordPress 2.5 was released at the end of March 2008. Do they still apply. Yes. For the most part they do. The changes to the WordPress Administration Panels (the Dashboard is just one of those panels not the whole thing) were mostly cosmetic.

But if there is a specific article you are concerned about, let me know or try it and see if it works for you in the new version.

I was thinking along the lines of the Media Library, the uploading of photos and the like. Little things would be page slugs, adding tags and changing and editing widgets. All those have changed from the old dashboard.

The Media Library is new, but also new cosmetically. It still works much the same as the old version, just more visual. I do like the easier ability to add CSS align classes, though the linking aspect has confused many, as it did in the old version. The gallery feature is fun, and I’ll have more on that soon.

Tags are tags, whether or not they came with Plugins or the native tagging in WordPress. They don’t change. The ability of automatic redirects with post slugs is nice, but the same as it just skips the redirect codes in the .htaccess file. So most of the tips within this month long article series, as with all the articles on my blog, continue to be fairly up-to-date, and I’ve written a lot about the new version as well.

Articles that are drastically changed by the new version that I’ve written I’m slowly going back and adding notes and updating them, and I’m constantly adding new documentation and information here and on the WordPress Codex. Living and working with an evolving program is just part of life. Things change, but the old stuff is still valid.😀

[…] smokes, this tip alone is GOLDEN and it’s from two years ago. I will certainly be tuned in to A Month of WordPress Tips from Lorelle on WordPress, my favorite WordPress-related site. Good stuff for newbs and know-it-alls […]

[…] WordPress Tips: I and some awesome guest bloggers are celebrating two years of WordPress.com on Lorelle on WordPress with the entire month of September dedicated to WordPress tips for WordPress and WordPress.com […]

[…] is hosted by WordPress or someone else, but there’s more you can do if you self-host. The customization options are limitless, and don’t need to be all done at the beginning, but no one likes to read the blank white, […]

[…] is hosted by WordPress or someone else, but there’s more you can do if you self-host. The customization options are limitless, and don’t need to be all done at the beginning, but no one likes to read the blank white, […]